Also Sprach Ray Arachelian:
On Fri, 12 Sep 1997, Declan McCullagh wrote:
We have a goddamn right to use encryption without a government backdoor.
It is not just a right, it is very nearly almost a law of NATURE. Not just a creation of logic, but a certainty that cannot be compensated for or guarded against.
Frankly among certain crowds many backdoors and other bugs have been detected in most OS's, how will the mother fuckers keep them from being found and used? I mean, all you have to do is simply get their attention and have them snoop on you, meanwhile you watch all the packets and record the weird ones and you've got a copy of their session.
Don't get distracted by wasting too much time in inappropriate places. My definition of "inappropriate places" being "places that do not yield enough information perceived as useful". The people who are viewed as the "enemy" here have a hell of a lot more experience judging the value of information as a weapon. (Not that this should be discouraging, just taken into consideration.) The weapon can and does become useless, especially if it concerns personal information, if the person involved has the emotional strength to be able to resist emotional blackmail. An enormous victory can be won by the STRONG, who are capable of withstanding personal attack in this regard and causing the enemy to waste enormous amounts of their time trying to accomplish impossible goals of erosion on individual self esteem. If you believe that this is mere paranoia, I urge you to make a serious examination of the circumstances of Alan Turing's death. As cypherpunks, you should all be interested enough to do so. His death and the shady circumstance surrounding it are a thing to be learned from.
After the evil laws, our jobs will be to break ALL GAK'ed software. How will they prevent that? Passing more laws to make the exposure of bugs and holes illegal? Sort of like the cell scanner laws? :)
There is a certain amount of quality control that the cypherpunks are doing for the intelligence agencies, and those same are perfectly willing to allow you to continue to do that...for now. Nor is it any coincidence that (I'm sure) some of you have been approached by said places with terms of employment and/or indoctrination. And of course this publicly available list is well populated with people who are perfectly willing to spam it with controversial and time-wasting rhetoric, designed to make those of you who are good at coding angry enough to waste your time denouncing their "chaff" instead. You are not dealing with either stupid or moral people when it comes to TLAs. Remember this, please. Once I believed in this country enough to die for it, I believed their propaganda and their lies. That was before I got a good eyeful of the incompetence, cruel lack of concern for human lives, the obsession with power and the selfish greed that permeates the American military; the unnamed "fourth branch" of our government; the sort of people who would allow a five BILLION dollar facility in Maryland to be built for their pleasure while people in New York and Los Angeles and Austin and Chicago - CITIES IN THE SAME COUNTRY THEY HAVE SUPPOSEDLY SWORN TO DEFEND - are dying of starvation, drug addiction, poor medical care, and the odd police brutality incident! I ask, no, I BEG you now, those of you who have the power to fight this: retain your individualistic morals and let no one subvert them by any means, because they are TRULY what our country was founded upon! I still believe in those ideals, yes - in SPITE of my exposure to the pack of misguided, selfish, greedy sons of bitches who have managed after two hundred years to turn it into a travesty of what it once was, and what it once meant to me. Don't let them jam you with their chaff! Ignore the bullshit and THINK! It's the LAST thing THEY want you to do! -- "It was sweet to hear of the Pathfinder | Do not CD c engineer's bumper sticker: 'My other | taunt --------P===\==/ vehicle is on Mars!'" -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, | happy fun /_\__ Unix Review Oct 1997 | fencer! _\ \